Saturday, June 9, 2012

Real Wildlife

After I covered Resilient Dragons, I started paying a bit more attention to how the player interacts with his or her environment, and the various animals and creatures of Skyrim are a very big part of that. The next couple mods I discuss will likely focus on changes to wildlife behavior and new additions to encounters you'd find in the wild.

One of the main things that I always thought was a bit odd with killing various animals in Skyrim is that most of the resources you could potentially receive from a dead animal are wasted when you try to take from its body. All you can ever get from most animals is the hide or the meat. What makes this even more peculiar is when you can find body parts of specific animals but not of others, such as the Sabre Cat eye or the Troll fat. Why are trolls the only ones with enough fat to scoop up? This limit in the resources from animals makes hunting a lot less thrilling.

Real Wildlife aims to add a bit more variety to animal corpses and goes even further by adding variance in age and health to most of the common creatures of Skyrim. You can find herds of wild deer, horses, or cows, each with different ages and the potential to be diseased. In the dirtier settlements you may find small rats, ants or spiders. New ingredients also mean new recipes and new food, which can be cooked as normal. For a better idea of what this variety looks like in-game, be sure to watch the video.

Another important thing to keep in mind before deciding to get this mod is that each age of creature will have its own difficulty, meaning the mature animals may prove to be very difficult to take down. The youngest age variants are closer to Skyrim's original creature difficulty, which means most animals will be much tougher. But if the challenge is something you're willing to accept, the variety makes hunting and traveling through the wilderness a much more rewarding experience. If this sounds like your kind of mod, but sure to read the full description and download it from either the Nexus or Steam Workshop.

That's all for now. Be sure to check back later this month as I continue to discuss various improvements to gameplay in the wilds of Skyrim. Until next time.